After watching a few movies recently, I am somewhat disturbed by the multitude of nice classic cars that are wrecked and/or blown up. Those idiots drive the heck out of those poor old cars and end up wrecking em or blowing em up. Those cars had been around for years only for a bunch of idiots making a movie to destroy it. We have several classic cars. They are meant to be enjoyed for generations to come. A beautiful 63 vette split-window was wrecked in the movie seven pounds. What a waste, it was a terrible movie anyway.
Do they fix the cars after they wreck em?

After watching a few movies recently, I am somewhat disturbed by the multitude of nice classic cars that are wrecked and/or blown up. Those idiots drive the heck out of those poor old cars and end up wrecking em or blowing em up. Those cars had been around for years only for a bunch of idiots making a movie to destroy it. We have several classic cars. They are meant to be enjoyed for generations to come. A beautiful 63 vette split-window was wrecked in the movie seven pounds. What a waste, it was a terrible movie anyway.Do they fix the cars after they wreck em?

There are duplicate bodies that you can buy of the split windowed vettes design, it's possible that what you saw was a mule car. It's also possible that the entire scene was CGI or that they built a mule car. Yes they do sell cars used in movies and people do fix them up, that's what happened to the Dodge Charger in The Fast and The Furious. I really think that California's fleet of rust free cars need to be sent elsewhere since they don't seem to appreciate them and think they are an environmental menace anyhow.
Best Regards
Arran

And a few "boyz from da hood" tried to steal a local '52 Pontiac. They broke into it. Drove it off. Parked it. Couldn't get it started again. So what did they do? Drench it in gas and burnt the poor thing to the ground. It's murder!

I agree, they could be purpose-built 'stunt doubles'. Example, in the current-release action flick Unstoppable, the locomotives shown being wrecked and destroyed were purpose-built stunt doubles, whereas all of the working ones had their theatrical make-up removed and were returned to their real railroad company owners when filming was completed.

And a few "boyz from da hood" tried to steal a local '52 Pontiac. They broke into it. Drove it off. Parked it. Couldn't get it started again. So what did they do? Drench it in gas and burnt the poor thing to the ground. It's murder!

Didn't think that anybody that young, could "steal" a car without a steering wheel ignition switch.

And a few "boyz from da hood" tried to steal a local '52 Pontiac. They broke into it. Drove it off. Parked it. Couldn't get it started again. So what did they do? Drench it in gas and burnt the poor thing to the ground. It's murder!

For the most part, any cars that are wrecked or destroyed in a movie are hardly more than scrap metal to begin with. Take a junker, Bondo it if needed and give it a good coat of paint. In some cases if you look closely enough it's not even the same make/model car!

Do such cars even run? Do they even have motors in them? Dunno.

Next time you watch one of these movies, watch these scenes very carefully and note the trick photography. The car will be tearing down the street. Next scene: the car will be screeching around a corner, going into a back alley. Next scene: car is driving in the alley. Next scene: chase car is also turning into the alley. Next scene: dead end, driver jumps out of the car and climbs a wall. Next scene: chase car is approaching and fires a bazooka or something -- or maybe crashes into the first car. But you NEVER see the bazooka shoot into the car, nor will you see one car driving into the other and crashing. You'll see a close-up of the guy shooting the bazooka, and suddenly another scene of the car going up in flames. At most, you'll see the car a split-second before it explodes; not long enough to notice it's a different car. Same with the crash; the car is heading into the other car, then a new scene with the crash -- not giving you enough time to see that these are different cars.

I've heard a lot of people complaining about the Thunderbird in Thelma & Louise. At the end of the movie they drove the car off the cliff. What a waste of a really nice Thunderbird! Uh, go back and look at it again; the car itself never crashed, in fact the very last scene was a slow-frame-motion trick photography that made the car appear as if it was going off the cliff. Nothing ever really happened to the car.

My 64 was considered for a movie once. This was to be a movie that takes place in the mid 1960's, with plenty of beach scenes; they were shooting on St. Pete beach. They were actually looking for several stock vehicles; they looked at mine and took pictures, but that's as far as they got. They DID use a friend's 65 Fairlane, and surprisingly another friend's street rod. They also used a 61 Dodge police car, that the city of Palm Harbor owns and uses in parades at times. But I suppose the budget ran out, because they never finished shooting the movie to my knowledge.

But on the other hand, do a Wiki search on General Lee, the name of the Dodge Charger in the Dukes of Hazard. Apparently, more than 200 were used in filming this six year series of garbage. Those were real jumps with real cars and real landings.

Back in the days when the Dukes of Hazzard was in production, I would see the remains of the cars that were wrecked during filming in the local Pick Your Part self service junk yard. For the most part the cars had already been wrecked or used up and had been patched up with Bondo and a coat of paint to resemble the General Lee. I do remember seeing a few good cars in the yard that were intentionally wrecked by the stunt drivers. Back in the late 70's when the Dukes of Hazzard was filmed, a 69 Charger was a 500 to 1000 dollar car and was considered an old gas guzzler, beater. Harry

A half dozen out of tens of thousands seems small, but out of those tens of thousands, how many have already gone to the crusher over the years? Keep in mind that cars with very few exceptions have not been purchased just to put in a bubble for preservation. They get used, and eventually they get used up.

I have worked in the film industry for over 25 years and most of the time
the car is a rusted junker that has been given a lipstick job to make it
look nice.

They may use a real restored model for the normal driving scenes,
and switch to the lipstick mule for the destruction, also as was mentioned earlier, these days the crashes use a lot of CGI work.

In the 50's, 60's and 70's if the car being destroyed was a new model,
they would use a much older model of the car painted the same color
for the blow up, they didn't have the budget to be destroying brand new cars.

I think the worst case of this was the general lee, since so many were destroyed. glad they eventually switched to using models instead of actual cars, which they should have done from the start. And yeah, a lot of movie cars are just lower end models dressed up. In the movie Christine, most of the cars were just dressed up plymouth savoys and belvederes made to look like a fury. good thing about that is that a few of the original stunt cars were taken from the junkyard where the movie crew had them dumped and now they are nicely restored.

I saw a "behind the scenes" on a car crash movie several years ago and it explained a lot - they think of cars as just another prop and treat them as such, disposable once filming is done. I hate to see nice classic cars trashed just for a movie, at least CG may help alleviate some of that now. Just my $0.02.